Show not tell revisited

This week I've been reading through my so-called final draft of Genehunter.  And when I took a long, hard look at the start of the novel I wasn't impressed with it. 

The novel opens with a prologue in the viewpoint of a minor character.  I know what you're thinking.  Some agents and editors don't like prologues.  But there are good reasons for this one.  The character in it isn't the main character, and it takes place on a different planet.  So why didn't I start with the main character?  Because she didn't know things this the minor character did, things the reader needs to know to follow the story.  So I think I've justified the existence of my prologue.

But its real problem was that it had only one character in it.  So the only way I could get the information across was by huge chunks of telling and his internal dialogue.  Not a sparkling start to a novel.  It was deadly dull, and I should have seen that earlier.  I've solved the problem by totally re-writing it as a dialogue between two characters.  Instead of having Maddison thinking to himself, now he's talking to his rather aggressive chief bioengineer.  This gives me a chance to explain things to the reader through their dialogue.  The prologue is a page longer, but much less dense, and far more sparky.

Then I turned to my chapter one and realised I'd done exactly the same.  In an effort to cut down the character introductions to my heroine Aris and her mother Kyra, I again had lots of telling.  It was also a domestic scene of setting up home.  Who cares about that?  So the whole chapter got tossed out and I started again.  Now the first couple of pages are a dialogue between Aris and Kyra as they discover the big cats on the planet.  I have Kyra contacting the Survey  chief and asking for instructions, expecting to be ordered off planet.  Instead, she's told to stay put.  Their boss thinks something bad is going on on the planet.

Now the chapter is mostly told through dialogue, and I have a mystery at the end of page one.  That's  a much sparkier, and more intriguing, chapter than the original.  And it's achieved through showing the action, not telling information in leaden chunks.

I've struggled with that first chapter for months.  I knew something was wrong with, but couldn't figure out what.  It was only when I pulled back my focus from the text to look at the craft that I realised I was telling not showing, and the solution presented itself.  Sometimes we need that helicopter view.